Normal was really rather... normal! We put Charlie in the local elementary school, Fifth District Elementary, which, despite its totally unimaginative name, seemed like a nice enough school. Besides, the most important part of any school is whether the parents want their child to succeed. I could put Charlie in the fanciest prep school in the country, but if I don't do my job as his father, he'd flunk. Neither Marilyn nor I would allow our kids to flunk that way.
We had debated putting Charlie and the girls in parochial school, but I was resistant. For one thing, Fifth District was barely five minutes from our house, right down Mount Carmel Road in Upperco. Our Lady of Grace was in Parkton, at the corner of York and Middletown, and probably fifteen to twenty minutes away. Secondly, my taxes were already paying for the public schools, and while I could buy both schools out of petty cash, it seemed really wasteful.
Finally, I just have an inherent bias against parochial schools. I did just fine in public schools, both this time and the last, and I was nowhere near as impressed with the job the Catholic schools in Utica had done with the Lefleurs. Or it could just be that what little religious belief I've retained, I still consider myself a Lutheran, hard core Protestant, and more than a little skeptical of Catholicism and their schooling. Well, all except the Jesuits, who have a solid reputation as scholars, and run some first rate colleges. You might graduate a convert, but you'll have learned how to think!
If there was a problem with Fifth District, we could always reconsider. Until then, it was a whole lot closer to run down the road. Charlie didn't seem to mind. You know those commercials where the child tearfully clings to his parents rather than climb on the school bus? (Marilyn had driven him to kindergarten last year.) Forget it! Charlie scampered down the driveway, climbed up the steps into the bus, and never looked back! I had gone outside with Marilyn to watch this momentous occasion. Marilyn and I just looked at each other and laughed. "Isn't this supposed to be real sentimental? Isn't he supposed to cry or something?", I asked.
"So much for missing Mommy and Daddy!", she replied.
"Wait until he starts asking to ride his little motorcycle to school." Marilyn just rolled her eyes at that. I stood there for a moment watching the black GMC following behind the bus. It had followed the bus from the bus garage, would hang around in the parking lot of the school, and then tail the bus home again. Fifth District wasn't thrilled, but I bought them off with a new computer system.
I gave Marilyn a quick kiss good-bye, and then climbed into my car to go to the office. "I'll be back by 5:30 or so."
Charlie was still five when he started first grade, just like I had been. In Maryland the cutoff date was the calendar year, so if you turned six by December 31, you started school when you were five. Charlie was an October baby, I was born in November, and Hamilton had been born in December, so we all started school at five. The twins, born in the summer, would start at six. It didn't seem a problem for Charlie, though. While Hamilton and I had been small as little kids, Charlie was big for his age.
The article in Fortune proved to be a mixed blessing. Now that the world knew of us, people started beating a path to our door. It got worse when somebody at Dell blabbed that we were involved with them, too. Mike Dell wasn't too amused when this all came out, but the article in Business Week clearly stated it was a Dell insider who spilled the beans. Both Business Week and Forbes ran articles on venture capital and high tech, and we were listed prominently with the other outfits who specialized in this area. At least I didn't make the cover, though my picture was on the insides in both magazines.
I was a little embarrassed by it all, but Marilyn took it with a great sense of humor. After reading the Forbes article, she had spent the rest of the night teasing me about it, whenever the kids were out of earshot, and gushing about how she got to sleep with a celebrity! I ended up giving her a good swat on the behind, which earned me some more laughter, and then later, after she put the kids to bed, I gave her a totally different kind of punishment!
Business wise, the publicity was generally a good thing. It gave us a lot of legitimacy in the industry, which brought both business and employees to our door. We began to debate opening a California office, maybe in the Palo Alto area, and trying to figure out how we would run that. It would mean additional travel for both me and Jake Junior, since neither of us wanted to move. He had started getting serious about a girl in the Perry Hall area, who was divorced and shared custody of their son with her husband, and who wasn't about to move. One possibility was finding somebody at one of the Sand Hill Road outfits and enticing them to jump ship and start up a new branch. We'd have to cut him in for a piece of the pie, for sure, but there just might be benefits to it. Fortunately, I remembered a lot of the names who made it big in the business, and I knew which ones to avoid, no matter what their pedigree was.
As for the new business, some was good, a lot was bad, and some was just ridiculous. We were approached by one guy who wanted us to back him on a chain of vending machines selling fresh roasted peanuts! This guy was convinced that people across the country were dying to stand next to a vending machine for five minutes or more so that they could get fresh roasted peanuts from it. The craziest ideas would get tacked to a bulletin board in the break room and was known as the 'Hall of Shame!' That one certainly qualified.
In early 1987, one of the strangest opportunities opened up. I became an author! Well, co-author, I suppose, and really, more like a glorified editor. It all came about because of one of my more innocuous habits. Generally speaking, it's harmless, and almost never gets me into trouble. Most of the time nobody even knows about it. I certainly don't advertise it, although it's not really very shameful.
I write letters to the editor.
It started innocently enough. On my first go through, when I was 14, I had read an article in Popular Science about canoeing, and I wrote back, adding my two cents worth about something I can't remember anymore, but it got published two issues later. It was like that first hit on the crack pipe, and I was hooked! Over the years I kept reading magazines and newspapers and smoking the crack. What I didn't realize when I started it, but learned later on when I had to edit the company newsletter, was how desperate most publishers and editors are to fill in all the white space.
I had letters published in everything from the local newspaper to major national magazines. An article on pharmaceutical sales techniques in Time earned a response that was printed. Two scholarly notes on Iran and ship building programs got published in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. One amusing time was when a local bridge in Otsego County was closed for repairs, and took three years to reopen. I wrote in the Oneonta Daily Star how I wasn't voting for the local state senator until it got fixed, and I urged other readers to do the same. Within two days I was placed on the senator's mailing list and received weekly updates on all he was doing about the bridge. Marilyn thought this was just as funny as I did. Another time I wrote a response to an article in the RPI alumni magazine after they wrote that KGS had bought a new chapter house in 2010 that had once been a home for unwed mothers. My response was that this was quite appropriate, since so many Keggers had spent so much time helping girls fill the home to begin with. That earned me some hate mail from that generation of Keggers and general applause from everybody else.